[Advocacy Advisors] interesting post about "Right to be Forgotten"

Thu Sep 18 17:53:07 UTC 2014

I’m pretty skeptical of the polling methodology here, at least without explicit disclosure of the questions posed. And their experts are… not exactly high profile :) So I’d take these results with a grain of salt. 

That said, there is of course interest in this in the US. It is obvious to anyone who uses the internet, in Europe or the US, that old information on the internet can have an impact on a person’s life/reputation - I got asked basically this question by a reporter for the Wall Street Journal in 2006, so it isn’t a surprising or even very new idea. And academics have been pushing similar ideas for roughly a decade as well.

So I think it is not too surprising that there is interest in solving the problem on both sides of the Atlantic. There is probably a deeper EU-US split on *how* to solve it - how to balance speech issues, public interest in various types of knowledge, etc., who should be making that balancing decision, and what sorts of policies/protections should be in place. I think it is pretty clear that the answer set out by the ECJ - making Google the judge and jury, with only one side of the story before it - is not the right answer, especially when it impacts a site (us) that already has arguably the best, and certainly most transparent, policies and processes in place to try and make that balance.

Two cents-

Luis
Luis Villa
Deputy General Counsel
Wikimedia Foundation
415.839.6885 ext. 6810

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On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 7:43 AM, Stevie Benton
<stevie.benton at wikimedia.org.uk> wrote:

> Hello everyone,
> Just saw this article via Twitter -
> http://www.softwareadvice.com/security/industryview/right-to-be-forgotten-2014/
> It gets some views form the US on the Right to be Forgotten and suggests
> that there is a significant number of people in the US who believe that
> something similar could be initiated there. Worth a read I think.
> Thank you,
> Stevie
> -- 
> Stevie Benton
> Head of External Relations
> Wikimedia UK
> +44 (0) 20 7065 0993 / +44 (0) 7803 505 173
> @StevieBenton
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